Most of the holiday shows now playing in Denver are secular pieces that capitalize on the season’s frenetic nostalgia but have no commitment to its meaning. But there is one authentic Christmas piece in town: Black Nativity at Eulipions. The play by poet Langston Hughes has a doubly emotional edge–a…
If you’re going to put a bearded lunatic wearing a suit made from banana leaves in your movie, the lunatic probably should be Robin Williams. He’s from another planet anyway, isn’t he? If you’re going to run a herd of elephants, rhinos and zebras down the main drag of a…
Many Americans who spent the better part of three decades with Richard Nixon may not want to give him three hours and twenty minutes more of their time now. But Oliver Stone, a moviemaker who’s always had more nerve than sense, is betting that the familiar Nixon ambiguity–half idealist, half…
The relief and joy most South Africans feel at the passing of apartheid in their country is everywhere reflected in Darrell James Roodt’s new film adaptation of Cry, the Beloved Country. Nelson Mandela himself has endorsed it as “a monument to the future.” Co-stars James Earl Jones and Richard Harris…
Wednesday December 13 Silver screening: Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, going to the movies was an event to be treasured, rather than a cheap thrill pocketed easily at any corner video-rental store. A gentle bow to the bygone heyday of great movie palaces everywhere, the…
Many galleries go the route of the easy-to-do group show in the month of December, because it provides viewers with a wide variety of potential gift selections and because the holidays are overflowing with other kinds of seasonal events. Only during the dog days of August–a time when no one…
One of the great art soap operas of the past year has been the acrimonious split between Open Press, the respected printmaking outfit, and CSK Gallery, one of the newer kids on Wazee Street. Since December 1993, the printmaker and the gallery had been joined at the hip, sharing the…
They’re baaaack. With the just-opened Beethoven ‘N’ Pierrot, Czech director Pavel Dobrusky and Norwegian counterpart Per-Olav Sorensen have once again brought “process theater” to the Denver Center Theatre Company. The first of their offbeat pieces–Stories, based on Isabel Allende’s novel The Stories of Eva Luna–was a delightful, technically brilliant bit…
If there’s anything Michael Mann savors more than the closeup so tight you can count the pockmarks on a hit man’s nose, it’s the betrayal so violent you feel like taking a shower after watching it. Martin Scor-sese and Quentin Tarantino notwithstanding, writer/director Mann is Hollywood’s real master of street-hardened…
Four decades and a year after Humphrey Bogart won Audrey Hepburn’s hand in a sparkling comedy of manners called Sabrina, Sydney Pollack has tempted fate with a $50 million remake. Luckily, Pollack’s been around: The man who directed Tootsie, Absence of Malice and Out of Africa wasn’t afraid to pay…
Wednesday December 6 Down memoir lane: Two memoirs that couldn’t be more different will receive attention tonight at the two Tattered Cover bookstores. In the Cherry Creek mothership, 2955 E. 1st Ave., things will be all glitz and flashbulbs when actress Loni Anderson tells all–she’ll autograph copies of My Life…
In the 1950s, when it seemed as if every artist in America was working in an abstract style, a handful of visionaries in the San Francisco area were creating to the beat of a different drummer. The “Beats,” close cultural allies of the Beat poets, defied fashion by addressing recognizable…
Cross-gender performances are not all equal. When women play male characters, we tend to take them seriously. But when men play female roles, we can’t help but laugh–it always looks like parody. CityStage Ensemble director David Quinn’s version of Richard Sheridan’s eighteenth-century comedy The Critic includes a riotous array of…
Something about the Roaring Twenties still seems naughty–and in the best sense of the word. Maybe it’s just nostalgia for a simpler time, but even the wild flappers, the speakeasies and the social experimentation had a much more innocent feel than our own jaded, cynical era. That’s why Mame, the…
There was a time when Sean Penn was better known for punching out photographers and headwaiters than for anything he did on a movie screen. So it comes as no surprise that The Crossing Guard, Penn’s second stab at screenwriting and directing, depends on a sullen and seedy look and…
The sun continues to set on Western movies, but there’s still time for a picture about Wild Bill Hickok that doesn’t make him out to be a saint, a singer or romantic fiction from a dime novel. Wild Bill, written and directed by an old hand named Walter Hill, purports…
Wednesday November 29 At your bidding: It’s a small service, but one that brings great joy into the lives of AIDS patients for whom pets provide a sense of well-being and belonging. Members of the organization PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support) help provide supplies and assistance in caring for those…
The first of many holiday shows, She Loves Me may well turn out to be this season’s best. This delightfully quirky musical has been given a delicious, intimate staging by the South Suburban Theatre Company, with a charming cast, fine direction and a very cool set. The action takes place…
Psycho Beach Party is yet another outrageous parody of B movies and pop psychology–and it’s somewhat brighter and cleverer than most. The cast at Theatre on Broadway is right on down the line, but the show depends upon the ingenious antics of its star, Andrew Shoffner, to really make it…
It’s unlikely that Mike Figgis’s eloquent tragicomedy Leaving Las Vegas will be a smash hit down at the local AA chapter. Because this is one movie about alcoholism and the algebra of need that doesn’t go in for sanctimony, self-help solutions or any kind of moral uplift in the final…
The crux of Patricia Rozema’s When Night Is Falling is a woman’s sexual awakening, which in itself has all the cinematic originality of a San Francisco car chase or a cowboy riding into the sunset. But Rozema is no commonplace filmmaker, as anyone who saw her cult hit I’ve Heard…
Wednesday November 22 Shane, Shane: Once the sloppy, sotted, folk-punk heart of Ireland’s Pogues, Shane MacGowan is back–in all his crooked-toothed splendor–with the newly configured Popes. The son of an office worker and a famed traditional Irish singer, well-read, off-key and off-color, late-season pub rocker MacGowan was transformed at his…
